Delayed Resuscitations NYU’s emergency room often has more than 100 patients at once but only 40 curtained beds, leaving many patients to be treated in the hallways.

None of the doctors The Times interviewed had ever seen that happen with a V.I.P.

One Thursday night in April 2018, workers in the emergency room got an alert that Mr. Langone would be arriving in about 20 minutes. They had to figure out where to put other patients to ensure that he could have a private room, according to two medical workers with direct knowledge of what happened. When he arrived with a two-centimeter cut on his thumb, doctors quickly stitched him up.

Ms. Greiner said no other patients were awaiting care during Mr. Langone’s visit. The two workers told The Times that the emergency room had been as busy as usual.

Image Dr. Michelle Romeo, who worked in the emergency room until 2021, recalled a famous actor’s jumping to the front of the line for a CT scan.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times Emergency room workers said these arrangements for V.I.P.s sometimes delayed critical care for sicker patients.

In late 2019, doctors were racing to rescue a patient in cardiac arrest. One pushed the gurney toward one of the private rooms meant for life-or-death emergencies. Another sat atop the unconscious patient, performing chest compressions. When they arrived at the room, they could not enter — a V.I.P. occupied it. The patient survived, but two workers who witnessed the episode said the delay could have been deadly.

Ms. Greiner said, “Without the patient’s information, we cannot investigate this claim other than to say that at NYU Langone, there is one standard of care for all patients.”

The Times identified many similar examples.

For example, a relative of someone on the hospital’s leadership team went into the emergency room with chest pain and was promptly taken to a private room, even as a man experiencing a life-threatening emergency — a blockage of blood to one of his limbs — was put in the hallway, according to the accreditation group’s investigation.

Another time, at the instruction of a hospital administrator, a V.I.P. patient with asymptomatic Covid was seen by pulmonology and infectious-disease specialists who had to be pulled away from sicker patients, according to two medical workers with direct knowledge of the case.

Ms. Greiner said that The Times had not provided enough information for her to be able to respond definitively, but that the asymptomatic patient might have had an underlying illness.

Dr. Michelle Romeo, who was a resident in the emergency room from 2017 until 2021, recalled when a famous actor with a headache and low-grade fever jumped to the front of the line for a CT scan, cutting off a nursing home resident who had possible sepsis and had been waiting for three hours.

The actor requested a spinal tap, which Dr. Romeo believed was unnecessary. A supervisor instructed her to do it anyway, she said.

Both tests showed nothing wrong with the patient.

Mr. Phillips, the lawyer for NYU, said Dr. Romeo had an incentive to criticize the hospital because she had not been offered a full-time position after her residency. Dr. Romeo said she believed she had not been offered the job because she had been outspoken about issues including the treatment of V.I.P.s.

A Public Shaming Over the years, doctors in NYU’s emergency room came to believe there could be career-threatening consequences if well-connected patients were dissatisfied with their treatment.

In October 2019, Dr. Joe Bennett was at the end of what’s known as a shift-change huddle, updating his colleagues on the patients he was handing off, when a frustrated V.I.P. approached him. The V.I.P. demanded that a family member immediately receive a CT scan, according to a doctor who witnessed the encounter and two others who were briefed on the matter.

Dr. Bennett explained that a sicker patient was the priority but that the family member would come next.

Soon after, Dr. Bennett was put on probation for what NYU said was a lack of professionalism, according to the three doctors. For months, the hospital required him to attend weekly meetings and write essays reflecting on how to provide professional treatment.

Image Doctors viewed the ouster of Dr. Kristin Carmody as punishment for her not catering to a V.I.P.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times About a year later, in December 2020, Dr. Kristin Carmody, who oversaw the education of medical residents in the emergency department, was forced to resign after a patient complained about having not received the level of attention or treatment that she expected. Dr. Carmody later said in a wrongful-termination lawsuit that the patient had been designated as a V.I.P.

Ms. Greiner said that the patient’s medical record had not included a friends-and-family label and that Dr. Carmody had been pushed out because she falsely noted on a medical record that she had personally examined the patient. (Dr. Carmody denies that.)

But inside the emergency department, her ouster was widely regarded as punishment for not sufficiently catering to a V.I.P. patient.

At a heated staff meeting that month, a senior doctor said Dr. Carmody’s forced departure appeared to be the result of a complaint from “a V.I.P. person that was connected to higher-ups,” according to a recording of the meeting. The doctor added, “The clear message is anybody can be taken down.”

Around that time, top NYU officials commissioned an internal review of the culture of the emergency department, whose employees were burned out from the pandemic and unhappy with their pay.

The investigation documented concerns with V.I.P. care, according to a presentation that Dr. Robert Femia, the chairman of the emergency department, delivered to doctors.

Many doctors and nurses “dislike the current ‘V.I.P.’ process because they perceive it as disrupting ordinary work flows” in which staff triage patients based on their medical needs, one slide said. “They do not recognize that the true issue is that every patient is a ‘V.I.P.’ patient.”